Walking with a heavy backpack, he hardly reaches the doorknob of
his home. After opening the door, he throws his backpack into his
bedroom, and then quickly opens his new game console. This kind
of character is the protagonist in a Japanese animation show.
The characters in past animation movies were mostly difficult to
relate because they hardly embodied modern life, but as our society
continues to evolve rapidly, more people have started to pay
attention to “normal people” in movies and animations.
Japanese animators had been making these kinds of protagonists
for decades. These characters are not perfect in their characteristics,
in fact, some authors even deliberately show the negative side of the
character. The animators strive to build characters that reflect real
people in real life.
The protagonist in Mamoru Hosoda’s “Belle” (premiered on 1/14
in the U.S.), Suzu, is a diva in her online life who has another name,
“Belle”. In reality, she is an introvert in high school where her
friends call her Bumpkin. Nonetheless, she is still a popular singer in
the online world because of her self-reflecting music, especially
when it comes to the loss of her mother, who tried to save a
drowning child from a flood.
Suzu has mixed feelings towards her mother’s death. She misses
her badly, but she also has an anger towards her: Why did she
sacrifice her life to save “a kid whose name she didn’t even know?”
She even gave up her talent for music because her mother supported
her pursuit of it. This paradoxical feeling is complicated and can
hardly be seen in American movies.
Hosoda believes that an important shift in focus occurred when
Disney artists made Belle “a more independent, intelligent and
contemporary young woman than her predecessors.”
“When you think of animation and female leads, you always go to
the fairy tale tropes,” Hosoda said through a translator. “But they
really broke that template: It felt very new. Similarly, what we tried
to do in ‘Belle’ is not build a character, but build a person: someone
who reflects the society in which we live.”
Other anime films such as “Your Name”, “Spirited Away” and
“Millennium Actress” all portray different adolescents who are
relatively plain and possess negative qualities.
“I wanted the main character to be a typical girl in whom a 10-year-old
could recognize herself,” explained Hayao Miyazaki, the auteur
of “Spirited Away” through a translator in an interview. “She
shouldn’t be someone extraordinary, but an everyday, real person —
even though this kind of character is more difficult to create. It
wouldn’t be a story in which the character grows up, but a story in
which she draws on something already inside her that is brought out
by the particular circumstances.”
Source:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/movies/anime-belle-yourname.html
his home. After opening the door, he throws his backpack into his
bedroom, and then quickly opens his new game console. This kind
of character is the protagonist in a Japanese animation show.
The characters in past animation movies were mostly difficult to
relate because they hardly embodied modern life, but as our society
continues to evolve rapidly, more people have started to pay
attention to “normal people” in movies and animations.
Japanese animators had been making these kinds of protagonists
for decades. These characters are not perfect in their characteristics,
in fact, some authors even deliberately show the negative side of the
character. The animators strive to build characters that reflect real
people in real life.
The protagonist in Mamoru Hosoda’s “Belle” (premiered on 1/14
in the U.S.), Suzu, is a diva in her online life who has another name,
“Belle”. In reality, she is an introvert in high school where her
friends call her Bumpkin. Nonetheless, she is still a popular singer in
the online world because of her self-reflecting music, especially
when it comes to the loss of her mother, who tried to save a
drowning child from a flood.
Suzu has mixed feelings towards her mother’s death. She misses
her badly, but she also has an anger towards her: Why did she
sacrifice her life to save “a kid whose name she didn’t even know?”
She even gave up her talent for music because her mother supported
her pursuit of it. This paradoxical feeling is complicated and can
hardly be seen in American movies.
Hosoda believes that an important shift in focus occurred when
Disney artists made Belle “a more independent, intelligent and
contemporary young woman than her predecessors.”
“When you think of animation and female leads, you always go to
the fairy tale tropes,” Hosoda said through a translator. “But they
really broke that template: It felt very new. Similarly, what we tried
to do in ‘Belle’ is not build a character, but build a person: someone
who reflects the society in which we live.”
Other anime films such as “Your Name”, “Spirited Away” and
“Millennium Actress” all portray different adolescents who are
relatively plain and possess negative qualities.
“I wanted the main character to be a typical girl in whom a 10-year-old
could recognize herself,” explained Hayao Miyazaki, the auteur
of “Spirited Away” through a translator in an interview. “She
shouldn’t be someone extraordinary, but an everyday, real person —
even though this kind of character is more difficult to create. It
wouldn’t be a story in which the character grows up, but a story in
which she draws on something already inside her that is brought out
by the particular circumstances.”
Source:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/movies/anime-belle-yourname.html
